Digital license plates finally hit the road in California

Aside from the advertising angle, there's not many of those 'benefits' listed there which couldn't be achieved more cost effectively than with a traditional sticker (i.e. the handicap badge, etc). Police cars tend to already identify stolen or unregistered vehicles, and I don't see why adding vanity messages would be worth the additional money. All I can see here is increased complexity and cost, with a much shorter lifespan than a traditional aluminium or plastic plate.

Of course, setting it up to have a refresh rate that was out-of-sync with multinova speed cameras (and distorting any captured image of it) would be interesting.

I always thought digital license plates would be privacy controls against ALPR. You could thwart casual trackers by displaying a rolling code that only police could link to a specific vehicle registration, ideally generating an audit trail along the way. Or skip plates entirely and do a cryptographic challenge/response with a transponder. Updating registration stickers is such a weird non-problem to solve. They could've done that server-side years ago.

Direct to consumer advertising in stop-n-go traffic...of course that's a thing.

Finally? So typical to embed the propaganda at the lowest level.

only took 3 years "finally!": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8950403#8950625

Whew, glad that "finally" happened!

CA is like the England of the US. Collapsing under it's regulatory weight, but not fast enough.

Oh boy, a new attack surface! drool, drool

So it's basically an iPad in the back. Can it play TV?